Monitoring a patient's vital signs is very important during hospitalization, especially for a surgical operation, recovery, intensive care, and other medical reasons. Patient monitoring systems have become commonplace and are standard in hospitals. Typically, patient monitoring systems have sensors for monitoring vital signs that are connected to a patient via various wires, e.g., between a monitor station and the sensors. Thus, it is necessary to place the monitor station in close proximity to the patient due to the limitation of the length of the connecting wires.
A patient care provider, including a parent, midwife, nurse, doctor, home care provider, or other health care practitioner, is usually required to go to the patient's bedside to periodically check the vital signs of the patient. In addition, the patient care provider also determines whether any alarm or abnormal condition is triggered by manually checking the vital signs of the patient or by viewing the vital signs on a bedside monitor. The frequency that the patient care provider checks the patient's vital signs decides the response time to an emergency condition for the patient. Therefore, it is desirable to provide a monitoring station that displays the patient's condition and issues an alarm for the patient, to reduce the response time by the nurse or other patient care provider when the patient is in an emergency condition. Furthermore, it is also desirable to provide systems, methods, and apparatuses for a portable monitoring device to keep the nurse apprised of the patient's status and receive any alarms regarding any emergency condition for the patient.
When the patient moves from one place to another place, e.g., from the operating room to the recovery room, the wires for the vital sign sensors are disconnected from the bedside monitor in the operating room and then reconnected to the bedside monitor in the recovery room upon the patient's arrival. During the relocation of the patient, vital signs are not monitored unless there is a bedside monitor that travels with the patient. Not monitoring the patient can be very dangerous. For instance, if a critical condition happens during the relocation of the patient, then the health care provider is not given any indication of such critical condition. If there is a bedside monitor accompanying the patient, the bedside monitor is connected to the patient via connecting wires, which can be very inconvenient since the connected wires to the patient reduce the patient's mobility. Therefore, it is desirable to have a patient monitoring system that can continuously monitor the patient's vital signs without interruption, even during the relocation of the patient, and can easily determine the patient's vital sign data without having to disconnect and reconnect the sensor's wires to the patient.
Patient monitoring systems are also widely used at home or in a home care environment. For instance, monitoring an infant at home is an application of in-home monitoring. Sudden infant death syndrome (“SIDS”) was responsible for 0.543 deaths per 1,000 live births in the United States (“US”) in 2005. Although the cause of the deaths is still unknown, many prevention steps, including altering an infant's sleep positions and bedding, were suggested and have effectively reduced the fatality rate of infants. However, in many other cases, such as improper sleeping positions (e.g., sleeping face down) or using dangerous bedding, the infant can suffocate to death. Therefore, it is desirable to provide a wireless monitoring system that continuously monitors the blood oxygen saturation (“SpO2”) of the infant during sleep to provide the infant's parents (or other infant care provider) an early alert to prevent the blood oxygen of the infant from reaching a fatal level. In addition, it is desirable to provide wireless systems, apparatuses, and methods for having live video images of the infant's activities and sleeping positions.